After over 5 years and 1500 posts, this will be my final blog entry as host of the Core Knowledge Blog.

The good news – no, great news – is that the blog will continue to host an ongoing conversation on curriculum, literacy, teaching and learning. It will continue to make the case for a content-rich education as the indispensable key to language proficiency, vocabulary growth, critical thinking, problem solving and nearly all of the big picture goals we prize in education. A guy named E.D. Hirsch will be taking over this space for now. I believe you’ve heard of him.

K-12 education looked very different when this blog launched in December 2007. The education reform discussion largely revolved around structural concerns—teacher quality, testing, charter schools, school choice, and the like. This blog expressed frustration early and often at the blithe lack of concern among policymakers and reform advocates with the content of our children’s education–what teachers teach and children learn. All of these structural issues struck me, then and still, as important but insufficient if we wish to see not merely incremental change, but a watershed improvement in student outcomes, especially for low-income and disadvantaged students.

The fight is not over. It will never be over. Education has a peculiar talent for endlessly re-litigating disputes, regardless of the weight of evidence, and relabeling old ideas as new and innovative. Is there any field that is as broadly ignorant of its own history as education?

Which brings me to what’s next for your humble blogger. Effective this month, I will be continuing to make the case for content, but in a slightly different form and venue. I will be leading an effort, along with some of the leading thinkers in education and public policy, to launch a new organization to advocate for civic education, to renew and revitalize the civic purpose of education. You will find me here shortly, and for now you can also follow me on Twitter here and Facebook here. You can also email me at rpondiscio@aol.com.

To be sure, I don’t view this as a departure from the work of Core Knowledge, but as an extension of it. Another voice in the happily growing chorus of those who understand and advocate for a content-rich education, and seek to rescue our kids from the joyless, skills-happy, prep-and-test drudgery to which schools too often descend. We have a larger mission to serve in education. One that transcends the unlovely if earnest end of “college and career readiness.” The public purpose of education is citizenship first. Don’s last book was titled, The Making of Americansfor a reason.

In closing, I am immensely grateful to have been associated with Core Knowledge for the last five years, and to have had this forum to make the common sense case for a content-rich education. I walked in the door a true believer in the Core Knowledge vision. I walk out the door doubly so.

I owe debts that can never be repaid to my Core Knowledge colleagues, in particular Linda Bevilacqua and Alice Wiggins. To Dan Willingham for his wise counsel, friendship and assistance. And most of all to Don Hirsch. It has been the singular privilege of my adult life to be associated with him and his deeply democratic and egalitarian vision of education.